


Out of Nine Lives I've Spent Seven

by ariadnes_string



Category: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-20
Updated: 2012-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-31 12:14:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/343950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ethan had five or six hours before the poison kicked in.  Plenty of time to complete the mission, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of Nine Lives I've Spent Seven

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: written for [this prompt](http://ghotocol-kink.livejournal.com/1494.html?thread=52182#t52182) at the ghotocol-kink meme and originally posted anonymously there. I've cleaned it up some and cleaned up at least one glaring continuity error.  
> a/n: title from The Band, "The State I'm In."

“Stop pacing,” Brandt said. 

He tried to keep his voice neutral, though all he wanted to do was shout. Ethan knew as well as any of them that moving around was only going to push whatever it was into his system more quickly.

Ethan glared at him, and then pulled himself into what was obviously a very studied and conscious stillness.

The rest of them kept him company with it. No one said a word or moved except for breathing while they waited for the IMF lab to get back to them.

Brandt spent the time trying to be grateful for the tech involved in the attachment Benji had hooked up to his laptop—some kind of long-range microscope that allowed the lab at headquarters to analyze the contents of the slide they’d swabbed and slipped into the proper slot. He conjured up a bit more gratitude for the lightning reflexes that had allowed Ethan to grab the assassin’s hand the instant after he’d been jabbed and rip the disguised needle out of his fingers. The would-be assassin had chewed some kind of cyanide pill immediately thereafter, so there’d been no information forthcoming from that corner, but at least they had a trace of what the compound had looked like before it entered Ethan’s body.

And that was all the gratitude he could come up with. Once it was done, there was just cold dread, dread that the hard lines and surfaces of the Manila hotel room they were holed up in did nothing to alleviate.

Finally, the laptop chimed the arrival of a response and Brandt, who’d been hovering over Benji’s shoulder to begin with, leaned farther in to scan the screen. Ethan, to his credit, held his ground, didn’t say a word until Brandt looked up, letting out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

“So?” Ethan asked, with the world’s most infuriatingly confident grin.

“So, it’s mostly good news,” Brandt said, keeping his tone steely. Benji leaned back in his chair slightly, indicating he was prepared to let Brandt field this one. “It’s a known compound—something organic made from plants native to the northern highlands.” That made sense, Brandt thought, Malagua had ties in the region and was known for his nativist sympathies. He skipped the Latin names the lab had forwarded, translated the cautious academic phrases into more practical terms. “It’s not usually fatal to adult humans. But it’ll knock you out. Comes on like Dengue Fever or something—joint pain, high fever, confusion—five or six hours after exposure. Lasts anywhere from forty-eight hours to two weeks. But they say they have various things at HQ to shorten the duration and alleviate the symptoms. So maybe they weren’t trying to assassinate you,” he mused. “Just hoping to grab you while you were delirious, pump you for info…”

“And--?” Ethan prompted, still with his uncanny calm.

“Hmm?”

“You said it was mostly good news—I’m waiting for the not-so-good news.”

“Oh,” said Brandt, hesitating. “It’s not bad, exactly, just less certain.”  
Ethan raised his eyebrows.

“Well.” Brandt tried to think of the best way to put it. “They wanted to make sure we knew that most of the studies of this particular poison had been done with animals. And with volunteers from Annapolis—volunteers with an average age of twenty-one. They, uh, they aren’t sure how a subject’s, um, age might affect the progress of the compound.”

Ethan’s glare moved from calm assessment to DefCon 6 and Brandt could sense Benji and Jane beginning to withdraw from the conversation. So, okay, he was on his own with this one, but if there was one thing he’d learned in his years as an analyst it was how to deliver unflattering news to the overly confident. Granted, it was possible that none of those people had ever been quite as intimidating as Ethan Hunt, but Brandt was alarmed enough by the situation not to give a single fuck about Ethan’s weapons-grade vanity.

“And yes, I know that you’re in better shape that ninety-nine out of a hundred twenty-one-year-olds,” he said, “but there are physiological effects none of us can escape.” Benji let out a kind of strangled snort at that one, then quieted. “So I say we listen to the boys upstairs and abort this one—get you where you can ride this thing out in relative comfort.”

He could sense Benji and Jane nodding in relief and agreement, but Ethan, though he ratcheted back the death glare a notch or two, started shaking his head.

“No,” said Ethan. “Five or six hours gives us plenty of time to complete the mission.”

And it was all Brandt could do not to punch him, even though he should’ve have known that’s where this discussion had been heading all along.

+++

Ethan didn’t flinch when Jane started towards him with the first aid kit, though it was possible that she did.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“I know.” She handed him a thermometer with impressive determination. “Just thought we’d get some baseline readings.”

“The lab also wanted us to know,” Brandt said, coming around the other side of the laptop table and crossing his arms, “that the chance of organ failure in test subjects increased in relation to the amount of physical exertion they attempted while dosed with this stuff.”

“Rats, you mean.” The thermometer beeped and Ethan handed it back to Jane without looking at it, then let her hook him up to some kind of miniaturized high-tech blood-pressure cuff. “Rats on wheels. Guess it’s lucky for us that the plan for this particular human mission doesn’t involve much physical exertion.”

Brandt had to literally bite his tongue to keep from asking out loud when the last Ethan Hunt mission not to involve physical exertion had actually occurred.

+++

Of course, now that they’d determined that the stuff in Ethan’s veins was merely viciously toxic rather than instantly deadly, there were other issues to consider.

Ethan had been right about the mission being unusually straightforward and non-acrobatic. One of Malagua’s lieutenants had turned, had offered to sell them a map of all the arms dealer’s stockpiles—some of them nuclear, and all in remote jungle locations one would never find without detailed topographical data.

The lieutenant, Felix Rios, knew Ethan from a complicated covert operation in the distant past—the team hadn’t been told the details—and had said he would hand the flash drive with the intel over to him and only him—in person and undisguised. Problem number one, though, was that meet had been scheduled to take place in the hotel where Ethan had been jabbed. Had been jabbed, in fact, a mere ten paces into the lobby upon arrival.

Thus, instead of setting up for the meet, they had to make an immediate strategic withdrawal—not as discretely as they would’ve liked, it was true, given the body of the would-be assassin lying foamy-mouthed on the expensive carpet—and relocate to this almost identical hotel several miles away. They’d missed the original meeting time while they’d waited here for information.

A fall-back meet had been built into the original plan, of course: this one in a high-class restaurant cum club in yet another part of the city. It was supposed to take place two hours after the first if the first fell through. If they planned to make it—and they did—they still had almost an hour to kill before they set out. 

Problem number two, of course, was that Ethan had some only moderately-well-studied poison swimming through his veins, waiting to strike.

But they all seemed to have agreed not to talk about that. Jane left immediately to run recon on the area around the club. Benji pulled on his headphones and hunched over the laptop, looking at various arcane data readouts of the city for anything that would help them—and neatly escaping the tension in the room in the process. 

Brandt took over pacing duty, trying and failing to stop himself from rehearsing the time table in his head over and over again: the meet would put them three hours into Ethan’s five-to-six hour window before the poison made itself known; assuming things went quickly, they would still have an hour or two to be evacuated by helicopter to a nearby aircraft carrier with a state-of-the-art tropical medicine unit on board. The doctors there had already been alerted. 

Plenty of time, as Ethan had said. As long as everything went according to plan.

According to plan. Brandt felt a little surge of hysterical laughter rise in him at the phrase.

Ethan had apparently taken the advice about physical exertion to heart. He’d stretched out on one of the beds, clasped his hands over his chest, and embarked on some complicated breathing exercise that culminated in something suspiciously like a trance. Brandt leaned over him, unreasonably troubled by the sheer stillness of his hawk-nosed face.

“You can stop looking at me like that,” Ethan said, his eyes snapping open to catch Brandt mid-inspection. He didn’t sound pissed off, just informative.

“Like what?” Brandt almost blushing at being caught staring.

“Like I’m some kind of bomb that’s about to go off.”

“Wish it were a bomb,” Brandt grumbled, his anxiety surfacing as irritation. “We could probably get you out of a bomb, no problem.”

This, for some reason, made Ethan smile. “Aw,” he said, “I didn’t know you cared.”

Brandt scowled. Of course he cared, and Ethan knew it. Only someone he cared about far too much could make him as consistently furious as Ethan Hunt.

“How do we know they haven’t made the back-up site?” he asked, not for the first time. “They knew about the first one, why not the second? How do we know Rios isn’t playing a double hand himself?”

“We don’t,” Ethan said patiently, and how someone could sound so authoritative lying flat on his back, Brandt didn’t know. “It’s just once warned twice shy—and we’re going to be a fuck of a lot more careful about our exit strategies this time.”

Which is how Brandt found himself riding behind Ethan Hunt on some insanely souped-up motorcycle through the packed streets of nighttime Manila, too busy trying to hang onto Ethan’s waist through the sudden twists and turns to take in the staccato directions Benji was hurling down the com lines.

+++

The Jaguar Bar, like so much of central Manila, was housed in a gleaming steel-and-glass high rise. Ethan drove the bike as close to the red awning of the entrance as he could and beckoned to one of valets.

“Keep it close, would you? We might have to make a hasty retreat.” Ethan gave the man smirk designed to imply dramatic romantic entanglements, and slid an impressive wad of pesos into his hand.

“Of course, sir,” said the valet, pocketing the cash.

It seemed to Brandt that Ethan moved more stiffly than usual getting off the bike, and that he paused for an instant once both feet were on the ground, as if getting his bearings. Nothing that would’ve been noticeable in any other man, just a slight hesitation in his usual catlike ease. But he squashed his worry before it could form. If he started second-guessing Ethan now he’d only work himself into a paralysis of anxiety.

It was still early by Manila standards, and the bar end of the Jaguar was sparsely populated, though a muted blare of laughter filtered through from the attached restaurant. Jane was perched at one end of the chrome bar, her gold and crystal jewelry glinting in the complicated lights. 

“Good to see you, boys,” she purred in their ears. “How you holding up, Ethan?”

“Never better,” said Ethan as they moved past her without making eye-contact. “Rios here yet?”

“No. We’re just inside the meet window now. The rest of the place seems clean. No sign of Malagua’s crew.”

“Good.”

When they’d found a table along the back wall, Brandt ordered a beer and Ethan ordered mineral water. He drank it fast, too, almost gulping—or so it seemed to Brandt’s overly sensitive eyes. He watched a small slick of sweat form in the hollow of Ethan’s throat and tried to tell himself was due to the combination of motorcycle leathers and inadequate air-conditioning.

Still, he was on the brink of saying something when Rios showed up. 

He was about Ethan’s age, but haggard with it, long lines seaming his cheeks under a thatch of salt-and-pepper hair. He headed towards them and then past them, passing close enough to Ethan to bump his shoulder. Brandt felt an almost giddy flash of hope when he saw Ethan reach into his pocket. Maybe the exchange had taken place—maybe they could all get out of here.

But what Ethan drew out and placed on the table between them wasn’t a flash drive but a slip of paper with Rm. 312 scrawled across it.

“Guess we’re going upstairs,” Ethan said, looking at Brandt, but for Jane’s benefit as well.

“Want me to cover you?” her disembodied voice asked.

“No. You keep an eye out down here.”

+++

The upper floors of the Jaguar Bar seemed to function as a slightly different kind of club, or at least the third-floor hallway was lit with a suggestive red glow, and less-than-respectable noises emanated occasionally from the closed doors along each side.

But even in the dim light Brandt could no longer pretend he was imagining the stiffness in Ethan’s gait, or the way strands of hair were beginning to cling damply to his neck above the leather jacket.

So much for egghead calculations, he thought bitterly, so much for theories of invincibility. But they were too far in to abort now. No point in even saying anything, since he could imagine Ethan’s response. He could only hope the exchange would go quickly and they could get the fuck out ASAP. 

He could feel the gun at the small of his back and the knife secure in its ankle holster, but they were small comfort again a microscopic enemy that had already completely its invasion. 

Just ahead of him, Ethan knocked on the door of room 312.

As they waited, Brandt saw Ethan visibly shrug off whatever symptoms were dogging him. His stance when Rios cracked open the door was as easy and confident as ever, his smile as cocksure. 

“Mr. Hunt,” Rios said, opening the door wider. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

He didn’t sound as if it were a pleasure. He sounded like he’d rather be a hundred miles away from here.

“You, too, Felix,” Ethan answered, striding into the room. He gave no explanation for Brandt’s presence, and Rios didn’t seem to expect one.

“You have the diamonds?” Rios shut the door behind them with a sharp click and followed them into the suite, almost bouncing on the balls of his feet. His abrupt tone and movements put Brandt on edge. Was he always this way, or had something spooked him?

It was impossible to tell from Ethan’s measured response. “All in good time, Felix. All in good time. I’ll need to see the data first.”

“Of course, of course.” Rios started patting his pockets as if he couldn’t remember which one held the flash drive. Brandt crossed his arms over his chest—Rios’s anxiety was starting to make him twitchy. The room they were in didn’t help: it had the air of a nineteenth-century cathouse remixed by minimalist Manila. Low red velvet furniture and ornate brocade wall hangings vied for attention with sleek tables and floor-to-ceiling windows. The effect was simultaneously stuffy and sterile. Maybe it was the décor that was weirding Rios out.

“Here it is,” he said at last, producing a small black rectangle and offering it to Ethan.

Ethan withdrew the miniature viewer from the inside pocket of his jacket and slotted the drive into the USB port. As he bent his eyes to the tiny screen, however, two things happened almost simultaneously. 

First, Brandt caught a shiver of movement out of the corner of his eye, something that suggested that those wall hangings might not have been as innocently decorative as they appeared. 

Then Jane’s voice buzzed low and urgent in his ear. “I think you might be about to get company, guys. Two larger than usual gentlemen just exited the bar, heading upstairs. I’m following.”

It was possible, of course, that the men in question might be availing themselves of the Jaguar Bar’s other pleasures, but Brandt doubted it. He subtly readied himself for a fight—knew without having to look that Ethan was doing the same.

The attack, when it came, was explosive—two men erupting out of the furnishings in a way that seemed impossible, given how empty the room had looked moments before. Jane’s warning had probably saved their lives.

Rios went down first, either in punishment for his betrayal or because his part in the charade was over now. A swift knife across the throat and he crumpled in a pool of blood.

In the second’s delay his death provided, however, Ethan and Brandt were able to overturn the velvet sofa and get it in between themselves and their attackers. One of them, caught in his own momentum, hurled himself over it before he could stop himself. Ethan neatly cold-cocked him with his pistol butt and flung him back the way he came. The other hung back, watching them with the contemptuous leer of someone who knew reinforcements were just on the other side of the door.

And he was right. When the door behind them burst open to reveal the two burly men Jane had warned them of—as it did about two seconds later—they were trapped with the couch to their back and the first man on the other side of that.  
There was nothing to do but launch straight at the new arrivals. So they did, Brandt with his old unarmed combat instructor’s word ringing in his ears:

“Use it against them, son” he’d told him once, after Brandt had been taken apart by a kid who’d rowed heavy-weight crew at Princeton. “There’s gonna be a lot of guys in this world who are bigger and stronger than you. But you’re a good fighter—maybe even got a talent for it—and one day you’re gonna learn not to take them on their own terms. You’re gonna learn to use those things against them.”

And Brandt had learned. He used those skills now, catching his mark wrong-footed and getting in far enough under his guard to deliver a sharp blow to the neck. The man stumbled and Brandt was on him, taking him to the floor in an unbreakable hold and then rendering him unconscious. A quick glance out of the corner of his eye told him Ethan had taken out the second man with similar dispatch. 

Which left, of course, the man on the other side of the couch.

Brandt heard the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked.

And then a shot. Though it seemed to have come from the opposite direction as the first noise.

Jane stood in the doorway, her Sig-Sauer in a two-handed grip. Brandt peered over the couch: the man lay spread-eagled on the carpet, a red stain in the middle of his chest.

Jane lowered her gun. “The place is crawling with Malagua’s men—I barely made it up here. He’s serious about this one.”

Automatically, Brandt turned from her to Ethan, expecting plans, advice, orders. But Ethan had pushed himself off the fallen attacker only to brace his hands on his knees, head down and breathing hard. He didn’t even look up at Jane’s words.

She and Brandt shared a look over Ethan’s bent back. 

“Okay,” Jane said, clearly biting down hard on all the things she wanted to say. “Okay. You get him out of here. I’ll do what I can to keep them off your tail.”

That, finally, pulled Ethan’s head up. “No,” he said, a little breathlessly. “No. Don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“Who said anything about risks, boss? You just get home safe.” And with a sharp look at Brandt that told him that if Ethan _didn’t_ get home safe it was coming out of his hide, she was gone.  
Brandt looked out into the corridor after her. It was deserted. 

“You okay?” he asked Ethan. “You with me?” He wasn’t at all sure what they’d do if Ethan couldn’t get out under his own power. 

But Ethan was upright now, at least, and his breathing was pretty much under control. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

They moved cautiously down the hallway, Brandt taking point. The elevators were almost certainly being watched, along with the main stairwells. But there had to be an emergency exit somewhere—or better yet, some external exit that would take them down the side of the building. He thought about trying to raise Benji on the comlink to get him to review the building's blueprints, but didn’t want to risk their frequency being hacked.

They made an arbitrary right at the end of the corridor, and then a left. All the doorways looked the same, but at the end of this corridor Brandt heard heavy footsteps and voices calling out in Tagalog.

“Company,” he hissed, half-turning to tell Brandt.

Who was suddenly nowhere to be seen.

Brandt fought his panic, scanned the space, and spotted him, crouched about ten feet back, digging at something on the wall.

“What--?” Brandt retreated towards Ethan and listening to the voices draw nearer. “Oh.”

Ethan was using his knife to unscrew the screen on some kind of vent. The opening was about two-by-three feet, and Brandt could tell exactly what Ethan was thinking, though he didn’t like it at all. 

“It’s some kind of unused system,” Ethan grunted, pulling the last screw loose. “No air passing through it right now. It’s bigger than it looks from the outside—there’s even a ledge in there for maintenance work.”

And that was all the time they had for discussion. The screen fell forward off the vent at the same time that the first of Malagua’s men rounded the corner.

“Right,” said Brandt. “You first.”

He pushed Ethan toward the opening with one hand and sighted on the approaching man with the other. A chest shot brought the first man down before he could get a round off and one to the knee felled the next. The third seemed to think better of the whole idea and headed back the way he’d come.

Brandt listened to the silence for one grateful second and then squeezed through the vent after Ethan, pulling the screen back over the opening as he did.

There was indeed quite a generous ledge inside—a place for maintenance workers to put their tools, maybe. Even so, it was a tight fit for the two of them—they were jammed together, their feet dangling in space. Not much was visible in the murky light that filtered in through the screen, but he could see that Ethan was staring fixedly straight up the shaft. Brandt didn’t like the expression on his slack face at all.

“Ethan,” Brandt whispered cautiously. “You okay?”

In answer, Ethan plucked out his earwig, and then reached towards Brandt’s ear and did the same. His fingers were sharp points of heat on Brandt’s skin. 

“Will,” Ethan said, and the use of his first name would have told Brandt something was very wrong even if he hadn’t been able to feel Ethan shivering where their shoulders and hips touched. “I need to ask you something, off the record.”

“Of course,” he said. “Anything.”

“Is there a cluster of bats about halfway up this shaft, or is that the confusion you were talking about setting in?”  
Brandt automatically looked up, because you never knew, right? But the shaft was dark and empty, except for a patch of lighter, more variegated black about thirty feet up.

“No bats,” he said, ignoring Ethan’s other question in favor of pressing his fingers to the pulse point under his jaw. Ethan's skin was furnace hot and his pulse skittered and raced. “Fuck,” Brandt said, before he could stop himself. The eggheads had apparently been right about the perils of physical exertion.

“Sorry,” Ethan murmured.

The uncharacteristic apology blindsided Brandt, plunged him into the maelstrom of fear and guilt that haunted the edges of his interactions with Ethan Hunt no matter how long they worked together: fear that something would go wrong on his watch; guilt because that had already happened, hadn’t it, and wasn’t everything that had come after his fault already? He shouldn’t have let Ethan attempt this mission, he thought in a fury of self-castigation; he should’ve literally handcuffed him to the bed. Better yet, he should never have let him get jabbed in the first place, should’ve made sure the intel on that hotel was impeccable. He could feel the tangled thoughts claiming him, dragging him down.

Then Ethan jerked beside him and made a sharp noise, like maybe the bats were starting to do something interesting overhead. It brought Brandt to the surface like a slap. Plenty of time to indulge in angst once they got of here--now was the time to muster up whatever ice remained in his veins. He curled one hand around Ethan’s wrist, made what he hoped was a soothing sound, and with the other dug in his breast pocket for the pen that doubled as a flashlight.

“See?” he said, shining the tiny beam into the darkness above them. “Empty.” He shone the beam below them: nothing there either, just the glint of a metal grid at the bottom of the shaft.

“Yeah.” Ethan drew a shuddering breath, seemed to come back to himself a little. “Yeah.”

Brandt flicked off the light and eased his earwig out of Ethan’s hot fist—he was going to have to risk making contact. 

“—the fuck are you?” Benji’s voice drilled into his ear the minute he had the thing in place, as if he’d been railing into the silence the entire time they’d been out of contact.

Hey,” Brandt said, relieved to hear his voice sound far calmer than he felt, “take it down a notch, willya? I’m gonna need you to take another look at the plans of this place for us.”

There was silence on the line for almost five seconds. Then Benji said, “Good to hear your voice, man. Jane said—“ He broke off, coughed to clear his throat. “You guys okay?”

“We’re hanging in there,” Brandt told him, though even that was probably a lie. “Is Jane alright?”

“I’m fine,” Jane herself cut in, not bothering to disguise her concern. “How’s our boy?”

“Yeah. About that.” Brandt cast another anxious glance at Ethan, who seemed to be very carefully not looking at the walls of the shaft. Perhaps even more worryingly, he seemed completely unconcerned that this discussion was happening without him. “We’re going to need an exit strategy, and fast—one that doesn’t involve us getting into any more firefights.”

He told them where he and Ethan were as specifically as he could, and then listened to Benji mutter and curse as he tried to find a set of plans old enough to include the disused air shaft.

“Don’t come back into the club—upstairs or downstairs,” Jane said. “Malagua has the whole place locked down tight. I got out through the kitchens, but I think that was only because Ethan’s the one they really want. I’m holed up across the street now, but you say the word and I’m right back with you.”

“No.” Benji was back. “Okay, I hate to tell you this, Will, but I think your best option is to go up. Go down and you’ll dead end in a giant tangle of antique air-conditioner parts. But you’re in the old part of the building, in the back, where there’re only six floors, remember? You should be able to see the vent to the roof from there.”

Brandt looked up, saw again the patch where diamonds of lighter dark patterned the shaft. “I see it.” He didn’t add how impossibly far away it looked. On an ordinary day, of course, a thirty-foot climb in a narrow shaft wouldn’t have been much of a problem, even for him—and for Ethan it would have been child’s play. But today was no ordinary day.

“Get yourselves out onto the roof,” Benji continued, “and we’ll figure out some way to extract you from there.”

“Um,” said Brandt. “Hang on a minute.” 

He took out the earwig, some weird protective instinct not wanting them to hear if Ethan started talking about bats again.

“Hey.” He tightened his fingers around Ethan’s wrist—somewhat surprised they’d stayed there this whole time. Ethan turned his head, startling out of whatever daze he’d been in. “Think you can manage the climb to that vent?” Brandt pointed. “We get onto the roof and Benji and Jane will get us out of here.”

Ethan looked up, his jaw visibly clenching. But when he turned back to Brandt, he was wearing a close approximation of his usual blithe grin. “No problem. As long as you’re prepared to run interference on the creepy crawlies for me.”

Brandt barked out a short surprised laugh. Then he put the earwig back in and said, “Okay, we’ll meet you up there. Just make sure whatever evac you arrange takes us straight to that goddamn aircraft carrier.”

+++

“Here.” Ethan pulled something from an inner pocket and pushed it into Brandt’s hand. Rios’s flash drive—Brandt had almost forgotten about it in the rush of events and he was amazed Ethan had had the presence of mind to hang onto it. “You go first.”

“No.”

“I don’t want to hurt you if—“ Ethan dragged in a breath around the very real possibility that the climb would be too much for him.

“You won’t,” Brandt told him. “You’re not going to. You first.”

Ethan shook his head slightly, grimaced, but then carefully shrugged out of his leather jacket and let it drop into the shaft. A faint _ping_ floated up from below, as if a zipper had hit metal a long way down. The black silk shirt Ethan had been wearing under the jacket clung damply to his body, soaked at the neck and under the arms, but Ethan seemed to have regained his usual terrifying focus. He ran his hands along the walls surrounding them, as if getting to know their texture, and Brandt imitated him, feeling with surprised gratitude, the way age had dented and abraded the smooth surface. 

Then, without more than a grunt of warning, Ethan pushed himself up and out until his braced arms and legs were the only things preventing him from following the jacket. With a slow, measured rhythm, he started inching his way towards the vent above: feet, then hands, then feet again. Somehow the very precision of his movements betrayed how painful they were—things usually instinctive now demanding considerable effort and thought. And yet, even under these circumstances, his technique held firm. Brandt watched for a moment, reassured by the way Ethan fluidly shifted his balance, kept his center of gravity low.

He eased himself out after him, and had to fight a moment of vertigo at being suspended in thin air. Then he set himself to Ethan’s pace and tried to narrow his world to the necessity of keeping his hands and feet in firm contact with the walls. It grew darker as they moved away from the vent, warmer, too, as they left the climate-controlled corridors behind, but for a while, things went smoothly.

“Watch out.” Ethan’s hoarse whisper floated down. “There’s another one of those ledges here. I’m just gonna—“

The black-on-black shape above Brandt moved to one side, folded itself against one wall with a barely suppressed groan. Brandt climbed the last few feet quickly, grabbed at the protruding ledge and hauled himself up next to the dark, hot bulk of Ethan’s body, glad for a break himself. The ledge was the same size as the one they’d started from, but the vent leading to it had been plastered over. The air was thick and hot around them. 

He listened to Ethan wrestle his breathing back under control for a few moments then dared to ask, “You holding up okay?”

Ethan made a kind of snorting laugh, which Brandt figured was pretty much all the answer that question deserved. “Better keep going,” he said instead.

And with that he was off again, more stiffly this time, Brandt thought—though it was hard to tell. They passed another ledge with only a muted “careful” from Ethan and Brandt allowed himself to cautiously hope they might make it. 

Then, just as the neon-lit Manila night was becoming visible through the vent above, Ethan let out a sharp hiss and froze.

“Ethan?” Brandt called. “You okay?”

There was no answer.

“Talk to me, man—what’s going on?”

Still nothing—though Brandt could just make out the way the lines of Ethan’s body seemed to tense further, as if in readiness for something.

And then, with an athleticism Brandt would have admired if the action hadn’t freaked him out quite so much, Ethan somehow brought his right hand to the opposite ankle and drew his knife. Balancing with two legs and one hand, he leveled the blade at the blank wall in front of him as if trying to judge the most lethal angle.

“Whoa. Fuck. Whoa.” Instinct rather than rational thought had Brandt clambering to close the distance between them. There wasn’t really room in the shaft for them to be anything but single-file, but Brandt didn’t let that stop him. Never more glad of his compact frame, he jammed himself in literally between Ethan’s legs until they were face to face, legs awkwardly pressing against opposite walls in the narrow shaft. 

It was only then that he realized how close this brought him to the expertly held knife.

The fever heat radiating off Ethan’s body and the humid air filtering in from above made the tiny space nearly suffocating, and the unseeing intensity in Ethan’s eyes pushed Brandt that much closer to panic. But he forced himself to take a breath, to search until he found what he knew was there: the core of coldness that had gotten him through these situations in the past, even if none of said situations had perhaps been as bad as this.

“Bats again?” he asked as conversationally as he could. He tried to calculate whether there was any conceivable way to get the knife out of Ethan’s hand.

Ethan shook his head minutely, eyes still fixed on a spot above Brandt’s right shoulder. Goodness knew what he was seeing—it could have been vines and leaves as easily smooth metal. Brandt hoped Ethan would continue to remember he was basically hanging in mid-air. 

“Snake,” Ethan said reassuringly. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it.”

And he drove the knife hard into a point about three inches from Brandt’s neck.

The shock of the impact made Brandt slide a terrifying three inches on sweaty palms. As he frantically pushed himself back up, Brandt heard Ethan mutter, “Missed,” and saw him ready the knife again.

Heart hammering in his chest and stomach clenched with fear, Brandt resolutely put his face in Ethan’s line of sight, willing him to register his presence. 

“Ethan,” he said, with as much authority as he could muster. “There’s no snake. You were poisoned, remember? You’re hallucinating—you’ve got to lower the knife.”

Ethan narrowed his eyes and tilted his head—still trying to get a fix on the imaginary foe. “Outta the way, Brandt. This is one of the bad ones. You don’t want it getting any closer, believe me.” He spoke with so much of his ordinary mission calm, had such a firm bead on whatever it was he was seeing, that Brandt almost did start to move.

There was no help for it. Brandt braced his feet and one hand more firmly against the walls, let go with the other to cup Ethan’s jaw, and turned his head so he couldn’t avoid Brandt’s eyes.

“Ethan,” he tried again, hoping he didn’t sound quite as desperate as he felt. “You’re spiking some kind of crazy fever. I don’t care what you’re seeing—it’s not there. You just keep your eyes on me, and let me worry about the rest. Okay?”

Ethan frowned, clearly torn between Brandt’s words and the evidence of his eyes, his cracking calm registering in the tremor Brandt could feel under his hand and the white starting to show around his pupils.

“Trust me, okay?” Brandt was almost openly pleading now. “Put down the knife and let me handle the creepy crawlies. You just keep your eyes on my face.”

Ethan studied him suspiciously for a moment longer, and then, to Brandt’s immense relief, gasped as if he were seeing Brandt for the first time. Then he got himself quickly under control and nodded tersely. "Yeah. Okay." 

But the submission seemed to bring a wave of weakness with it, or maybe he just forgot for a moment what was holding him up, because the pressure he was exerting with his feet and arm against the walls slackened, and he started sliding precipitously down the shaft, hips bumping painfully into Brandt’s shins.

It was probably only the fact that Brandt was wedged so firmly beneath him that saved them both. That and the fact that sick as he was, Ethan could still move like a goddamn jungle cat. Even so, they descended at least two feet, scrabbling for purchase, before they were steady again. Sometime during the confusion, Ethan’s knife plummeted to the bottom, missing Brandt’s ear by a finger’s breadth on its way down.

But at least the shock of the drop seemed to bring Ethan back to himself. 

“You okay?” he croaked as soon as they’d regained some kind of equilibrium again, and the worry in his voice told Brandt he’d regained a proper respect for what was going on.

“Yeah,” Brandt called down—somehow in the confusion he’d ended up above Ethan in the shaft. “You?”

“No snakes, no bats,” Ethan said, voice only shaking a little. “Guess that’s the best I can hope for right now.”

+++

“Okay,” Brandt said. “Right. One more. This one’s a bit trickier, but I think—yeah—“

He kept up the stream of words more for his own benefit than Ethan’s. Ethan, he was pretty sure, was the past the point of auditory processing. Besides, he truly hoped that Ethan was giving his available energy to remaining on the narrow service ledge at the top of the shaft.

Ethan was still conscious, or mostly conscious, but Brandt was working the bolts on the vent separating them from the roof with one hand and keeping Ethan pressed to the wall with the other on the quite reasonable supposition that that state of affairs was unlikely to last. The position slowed his progress, it was true, but the extra security seemed worth it.

Undoing the bolts from the inside out was awkward, but the humidity and salt air had corroded them somewhat, so it was possible to slide them out from this direction, especially with the help of the miniature all-purpose tool gizmo Ethan had magically produced from his trouser pocket.

“Gotta get me one of these,” Brandt muttered as he worked at the last stubborn bolt. 

The shaft poked up a few feet past the roof, and the vent was at right angles to the service ledge, which made getting at the bolts somewhat precarious. Finally, though, Brandt felt the last one slide free. He pushed at the metal grate and it fell away with an anguished creak and crash.

Without relinquishing his hold on Ethan, Brandt twisted and pulled until he’d gotten his torso out of the narrow opening, hauling Ethan after him, though Ethan made a surprising amount of effort for himself. They dragged their legs through and then they were out on the concrete roof, under the murky glow of the Manila night. 

The earwig buzzed in Brandt’s ear at almost the exact moment that he realized that there was no one on the roof to meet them. 

He didn’t realize how much he’d been counting on the idea of instant extraction until its absence hit him like a blow. He staggered a little, though that might have been the fact that he was now bearing most of Ethan’s weight on the arm he had locked around his waist.

“You there?” Benji asked, in a tone Brandt recognized as I-am-absolutely-categorically-not-losing-my-shit-right-now.

“We’re here—where the hell are you?” Brandt found he could only talk in staccato bursts. Still winded from the climb, maybe, or resolutely not freaking out himself. “Not gonna stand me up on prom night, are you, Benji?”

“No way, not a pretty thing like you. But we’re fifteen, maybe twenty minutes out. Had to do a little, uh, negotiation for some back-up. Think you can hang in there that long?”

Brandt knew what he was asking. “If we need to. He’s in pretty bad shape, but we can handle twenty minutes. I think.” He tightened his grip around Ethan, who had started shivering hard, even though the night air was as hot and damp as a gym sock. “Just get here as fast as you can, okay?” The last part came out more of a plea than he meant it to.

“Faster’n you can say ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ mate. Hang in there.”

The line clicked out. Brandt scanned the roof for some kind of shelter. The windowed wall of the taller part of the building rose up another five floors at one end, complete, Brandt was dismayed to note, with service doors leading out onto the roof: easy for Malagua’s men to get to them, if they made the connection about the air shaft.

The remaining three sides of the roof were lined by a low wall. Any other night, Brandt was sure Ethan would’ve suggested, probably insisted, that they attempt the six-floor climb down to street level—ropes or no ropes. Tonight he seemed barely cognizant of where they were.

The rest of the space was dotted with a various pipes and vents like the one from which they’d emerged. Brandt steered them towards the largest one—at least they could put it between themselves and the doors. It was slow going; the last bit of the climb had clearly taken almost all of Ethan’s reserves, and he listed heavily against Brandt, shaking and drenched in sweat.

Brandt felt a little bad about dragging him, especially since every movement seemed to elicit an involuntary grunt of pain, but drag—and chivvy—and yank—he did until they reached the squat brick chimney and more or less collapsed against it, Ethan sprawled almost across Brandt’s lap.

“Okay. Okay.” Brandt pulled Ethan against him, instinctively offering warmth, though it had be well over 80 out here. “Just a little while longer. All we have to do is sit tight.”

There was no response.

“Fuck,” Brandt said. “Goddamnit.” He searched a little frantically for a pulse and sighed when he found one, for all that it was thready, rapid, and weak. “Do no check out on me. You are not going to check out on me, Ethan Hunt, you hear me?” He was blindsided momentarily by the old guilt and fear and tapped Ethan’s cheek a little harder than he intended. “Come on. Come on, give me something, man.”

He tapped again, almost a slap this time, and was rewarded by a faint groan.

“Not checking out.” Ethan’s voice was mostly breath. He didn’t open his eyes. “Thought you said… no one ever… died from this stuff.”

“Usually.” Relief made Brandt terse. “No one usually dies. But I don’t think the field trials ever reached the level of rigor you just put this shit to.” He shifted around so he could get Ethan’s head pillowed on his shoulder and wished hard he had some water, or even a handkerchief to wipe his face.

“Will.” 

“Yeah?” Ethan’s voice was so soft Brandt had to crane until his ear was almost against Ethan’s lips. “Yeah?”

“Anyone ever tell you...your…bedside manner…sucks?”

And he was out again.

Brandt cursed, then forced himself to get a grip on his emotions and positioned himself for the best view of the doors that would still keep Ethan mostly hidden. “No one’s checking out,” he murmured to the soggy night. “Not on my watch.”

He cupped one hand protectively around the back of Ethan’s head and with the other un-cocked the safety of his gun.

+++

Brandt was concentrating so hard on the shallow in-and-out of Ethan’s breath that he must’ve lost a few moments himself. At any rate, the spill of yellow light across the darkness, when it came, seemed as sudden as a lightning bolt. He pressed himself tighter against the chimney and peered at the men silhouetted in the doorway: two at least—and now another two pressing in behind.

The men said a few words to each other in Tagalog that Brandt couldn’t follow—but the import was clear. Flashlight beams bisected the dark as the men spread out across the roof.

Much as he hated to do it, Brandt slid Ethan away from him, propped him as best he could on the wall, so as to have both hands free. Ethan barely twitched. 

Four against one was lousy odds; best, Brandt thought, to hold onto the element of surprise as long as he could, let the men get as close as possible to their meager hiding place before trying to take one out. He crouched, gun at the ready, as the lights bounced off the vents and chimneys, coming closer and closer.

And then, with timing that was either exquisite or catastrophic, the air around them roiled as a helicopter emerged out of the night. Its running lights were off, but its black shape was stark against the sky as it slowed to hover directly overhead.

Brandt, at least, was primed for the arrival of reinforcements, so he took advantage of Malagua’s men’s surprise, rising to his feet and picking off one of them while he was still looking up. 

“Almost missed the party, man,” he said into the com line as he tried to get a bead on another. “That’s the last time I save a slow dance for you.”

“Told you we’d be here with bells on,” Benji said into his ear. “Jane’s on her way down—bringing party favors and everything.”

Brandt risked a glance up. Two figures were descending rapidly on lines from the ‘copter’s belly. The most important party favor seemed to be an HK416, if he was correctly identifying the shape of the thing Jane was holding.

Light hit him square across the eyes and a bullet whizzed past his cheek, reminding Brandt that important things were going on at ground level. Without thinking, he ducked back behind the chimney—only to find himself staring into the beam of another flashlight—one of Malagua’s men dimly visible behind the glare. Brandt tried to get his own gun up quickly enough, but before he could, the light left his face, streaking up and away as the man holding it toppled backwards. Belatedly, a shot rang in his ears.

Brandt swung around to find Ethan slumped against the wall, legs splayed in front of him, holding his pistol in a two-handed grip. His eyes were barely slits, but the gun was steady as rock. 

“Thanks,” Brandt gasped, at almost the same moment he heard the hard thump of Jane and her companion landing on the roof. 

There was a short burst of machine gun fire as they announced their arrival, and the gurgle of someone going down. “Will,” Jane called. “You here somewhere?”

“Yeah,” Brandt shouted. The time for subterfuge was clearly over. “We’re here.”

“The boss conscious?”

Brandt looked at Ethan. His eyes were closed again. “Not so much.”

Brandt thought he heard Jane swear, but she’d clearly come prepared for this eventuality. “Okay. We’re gonna give you some cover while you get him out of here—this particular scenic rest stop is officially over.”

“Gotcha.” Brandt bent and pulled one of Ethan’s arms securely over his own neck. “Hear that?” he asked, though he doubted Ethan had. “The cavalry has arrived.”

He hauled Ethan to his feet, groaning a bit with the effort, and more or less carried him the short distance to where Jane and the man who’d come with her were standing, almost deafened by the continued fire and the thrum of chopper blades overhead.

The man thrust a line and harness at him as soon as they were close enough. He was dressed in black, nothing showing except for a narrow strip of skin around almond eyes—no way of knowing if he were some special forces operative IMF had managed to second, or local muscle hired for the night. Hand-off accomplished, he was instantly back to trading shots with a man dug in behind the very air shaft through which Brandt and Ethan had arrived.

Brandt stared blankly at the straps and fastenings of the harness, Ethan’s weight across his shoulders growing heavier by the moment. He was sure that he’d been taught how to transport an unconscious man in one of these things at some point in his training, but damn if he could remember it now. But those endless drills had obviously been good for something; his fingers rapidly arranging things of their own accord, until somehow Ethan’s furnace-hot body was tight against his own, and they were both securely anchored to the line. 

“You good?” Jane gave them a quick once-over and a fierce grin. “You’re good. Up you go.”

She made some kind of complicated signal above her head, and then they were aloft, moving straight up through air so thick and warm it felt alive, into the welcoming maw of the chopper.

+++

This deep inside the aircraft carrier it was hard to remember you were at sea at all. On the upper decks, you could look down—albeit pretty far down—and see the ocean, but in the windowless rooms of the sickbay, there was no telltale roll, barely a trace of salt in the antiseptic-laden air.

Just as well, Brandt thought, listening to the joints in his back crack as he stretched. He’d never liked boats.

Not that he wasn’t grateful for this one. The Navy docs—a man and a woman with nearly identical weathered skin, cropped blond hair and wire-rim glasses—clearly knew their stuff. They’d been able to stabilize Ethan pretty quickly, get the fever under control, and medicate him for the joint pain. Then there’d been nothing to do but wait as the poison made its way out of his system—something that seemed to involve Ethan sleeping almost continuously and being less than coherent in the few moments he was awake. 

The doctors had been in a state of barely suppressed glee at being able to collect data on the effects of a rare compound in extreme field conditions—on a “mature subject,” they kept saying, though Brandt sincerely hoped Ethan never heard them use that phrase. But at least their scientific zeal had been tempered by a willingness to let the team stay at his bedside almost round-the-clock. The doctors and their equally competent nurses even brought them coffee once in a while. 

The three of them had taken it more or less in shifts, so it was mostly sheer chance that it was Brandt sitting in the hard plastic chair next to the bed when Ethan woke up lucidly for the first time. 

Only mostly, though—because it was possible he’d taken slightly more than his fair share of shifts for the three days they’d been there, only occasionally letting Jane and Benji lure him away to eat or shower or nap. Truth be told, ever since the medics had almost literally pried Ethan out of his arms on the deck of the carrier (he never did find out exactly who’d been piloting that helicopter), he’d been finding it difficult to let Ethan out of his sight. The old sense of responsibility, perhaps, returned with a vengeance—or maybe something new, forged on that long, brutal night.

In any case, when Ethan opened his eyes, looked at him and said his name as if he actually recognized him, Brandt was off the chair in an instant, leaning over the bed and helping Ethan manage the straw in the bedside cup of water.

Ethan was exhausted after just a few sips and after swallowing he lay very still on the pillow. He didn't move, but Brandt could tell he was assessing the situation—taking in the beep of monitors and the IV lines and the pulse-ox clip on his finger. All he said, though, was “Where…?”

Brandt smiled and lowered one of the guard rails so he could perch on the edge of the bed. “Welcome to the U.S.S. Location Undisclosed. Technically speaking, I think this ship is in the Gulf of Hormuz right now. Except for how it’s not. You’ve been giving the doctors quite a treat.”

Ethan raised his eyebrows a fraction of a degree.

“You’re going to be fine,” Brandt answered the unspoken question. “Soon as they flush this stuff out of your system, you’ll be good as new. More or less. But they’re pretty sure the damage to your spleen will repair itself without surgery.”

Ethan crooked his lips minutely, and murmured something that might have been, “bedside manner.”

“You’re going to be fine,” Brandt repeated. “You just need to rest.”

Ethan seemed as if he wanted to say more, but all he did was turn one of his hands palm upward on the sheets. Brandt could see the effort even the simple movement cost him, and before he knew it, he'd covered the hand with his own. 

“Thank you,” Ethan said, very faintly, but distinct. And then, as if he’d accomplished all he needed to, he slid abruptly back into sleep.

Brandt looked at their joined hands and wondered whether he wanted more than that simple acknowledgement. Did he want Ethan to stop taking such ridiculous risks, to promise not to do something so foolhardy ever again? It seemed too much to ask. And besides, he wasn’t sure if it was what he wanted anyway.

Very gently, careful not to squeeze, Brandt curled his hand around Ethan’s. In a minute, he’d get the doctors. In a minute he’d go tell Benji and Jane. Right now it seemed enough to sit there, feel Ethan’s fingers cool and dry against his own, and hold on.


End file.
